Sliding down the banisters of the ivory tower.
I’m not sure if anyone reads this who doesn’t also read The American Scene on a regular basis, but I wanted to make sure everyone knew that I’ll be making the bulk of my posts there for the time being. Please come over and join the conversation.
Nicola can generally be found at the Yale Free Press these days. You should bookmark that too.
From the Yale Daily News:
Christopher Buckley ‘75, the satirical author and political commentator, will give the Class Day speech at this year’s commencement, the News has learned.
…
“Were I to give a speech,” Buckley explained, “I would probably in the first paragraph explain how to solve the financial crisis. In the second paragraph, I think I would deal swiftly with how to achieve peace in the Middle East. And in the third paragraph I would probably talk about how to get a job at Starbucks.”
Posted without comment, except to say that this will be given a thorough recap after the fact.
So while blogger etiquette demands that I give some sort of accounting of the last few months of silence here on Iqra’i, and some sort of vague and tantalizing promise of “big changes” that may be afoot in the near future, I will refrain from doing either at present. Largely because undergraduate bloggers are half-tamed things, and to expect predictability or accountability from us is often unwise. Suffice to say that when I’ve got something to say (sir), I’m going to say it now.
I watched today’s inauguration in a spare classroom (no, not one from a canceled class). Like plenty of other bloggers out there, I was struck by the end of the oath of office — the “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution” part. But I think Andrew et al., in focusing on the last man to take that oath, aren’t paying enough attention to the fact that it was administered with equal solemnity to the forty-two before him as well, which is what makes it really interesting. Each incoming President of the United States has sworn his allegiance to a document. Not the nation, and not even its body of laws, but the blueprint of its federal government. It’s a bit weird.
Allegiance by synecdoche itself is pretty standard, of course — ever pledged allegiance to the flag? But the Pledge makes the connection explicit: “…and to the republic for which it stands.” The Oath of Office never does; instead, it enlists the president into a series of active verbs that sound like some chivalric honor code. (The mental image reminds me of some scene from a future National Treasure sequel, with the President carrying the Constitution under one arm out of the wreckage of the National Archives as he fights off a pack of terrorist ninjas with the other.)
And the conventional oath for the vice president — and, for that matter, all Senators and Representatives — is even more ridiculous in its swashbuckle. You may have missed this if you were still reeling from the sight of Aretha Franklin’s fabulous hat, but Joe Biden solemnly swore to (among other things)
support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same…
Afterwards he held onto the Lincoln Bible for a few moments before unloading it onto someone else, lugging it awkwardly as if it were a gag prop. Which, in a way, it was. The oaths may be taken on the Bible, but it’s merely the witness; the Constitution, indisputably human-written, is the addressee. (Arguably, John Quincy Adams had it right when he swore on a book of constitutional law instead, or maybe it was redundant.)
It’s also controlling the proceedings, of course, and to me this is the weirdest part. Flub or no flub, the presidential oath of office didn’t matter. Barack Obama became president before he stepped up to the podium, somewhere during that interminable “Simple Gifts” performance, at exactly 12:00 pm. That is what the Constitution says, and that is what happened. The oath was just for show, like opening a solstice ceremony with a pledge to uphold the sun. (For what it’s worth, I agree with what’s been said about how flat and prosaic Obama’s speech and Elizabeth Alexander’s inaugural poem were, but they weren’t the point either. They were just everyday, spoken words. The ones that mattered were silent.)
Linda Hirshman has a fascinating exegesis of Obama’s choice to address his “fellow citizens,” rather than “fellow Americans.” But it seemed far simpler to me when I heard the speech myself. American nationhood is a fundamentally political thing: the Constitution its emblem, the citizen its basic unit. We were no nation before we were a state. (The national capital, America’s only monumental city, is as good a setting as any to underscore this.)
Which isn’t to say that politics is a sufficient base for interpersonal relationships, or that American civic culture needs to be fundamentally political, or even that welfare doesn’t “dehumanize” charity by politicizing it (though I don’t disagree with the last). But it is something to keep in mind.
Often I ask myself: what’s the “tipping point,” new-content-wise, that distinguishes a comment on another blog from a post on this one?
Today I figured out the answer.
Comment: wondering what Alicia Keys is doing in the new James Bond theme.
Post: realizing that — of course! — she’s there because she’s supposed to be Amy Winehouse.
The video makes so much more sense now. The lingering shots of eyelids and wrists. The excessive mic-seducing pouts. The retro-raunchy that keeps its edges so jagged that it turns out retro-pushy — but in a loose, tame way, like a girl lip-synching in front of her mirror.
Seriously, did the James Bond Theme Song Brain Trust rethink anything after jettisoning her? Or did they just try to find two musicians who, if morphed together, might approximate Amy Winehouse — and then, upon deciding that Jack White and Alicia Keys fit the bill reasonably, skip the crucial step of morphing them? (And don’t tell me that’s scientifically impossible. This is the Bond franchise, people.)
I mean, I like the song (almost despite myself), and I guess I appreciate their attempts to think ahead to the (likely near) day when we won’t have her around anymore. But if imitation can’t compare to the real thing, sometimes innovation can’t either.
UPDATE: Okay, so it problematizes my distinction just a little bit to point out that Poulos didn’t see this as worth posting on when he wrote his comment — before I wrote mine — on the original post…
Are you looking for something to add to your Google Reader that isn’t quite as taxing as “Diaries of the Greats: Commemorative Blog Edition” (Pepys; Orwell) but has a bit more intellectual meat to it than, say, that cluster of Mad-Men-character Tumblrs that was hot for about a minute and a half this summer?
I give you “Being and Nothingness: le weblog personnel de Jean-Paul Sartre.”
Mocking the misanthropy of genius hasn’t been this much fun since Strindberg and Helium.
The Pepys/Orwell phenomenon highlights something else, actually: even as the infinite capacity of the Internet has broken all rules regarding a certain kind of time-boundedness — eliminating the tendency of old information to get “buried” under new information, for example (much to the chagrin of Google News and United Airlines) — the rise of blogs has encouraged packaging information in a serialized manner for consumption. Pepys and Orwell aren’t just being reintroduced for the 21st century, but de-archived (in a manner of speaking). Sidestepping the question of whether or not we’d be able to handle reading their diaries at one go these days, it seems like a really solid marketing strategy for targeting people who are mature/stagnant enough in their Web use that they tend toward “checking” rather than “exploring”.
Rule: I take criticism poorly. I find it irritating. But I don’t find it disturbing.
Exception: The commenter who responded to my YDN column about the lack of explanation surrounding increased campus police presence by asking, “What are you trying to hide?”
Oh, right, I forgot. Only the most shamefully degenerate college student would ever engage in illegal activity. Like underage drinking. Or file-sharing. Or jaywalking.
Of course, that’s not only a straw man but an inaccurate one. The real assumption is that it’s foolish to think that the police would ever care about the illegal things students do, because their sole purpose is to protect us from the bad guys. Sure, this comes from a place of blind faith in the institution — “Of course the University has nothing but our best interests at heart!” — but also from entitlement: “We pay their salaries with our tuition, they have no choice but to be on our side!”
There’s also the fact that the closer you get to having decision-making power yourself, the sillier it seems to scrutinize the intentions of power (Obama on FISA, anyone?). But as dangerous as it is to rationalize that “When I’m in charge it will all be okay,” it’s more troubling to assume that there’s some sort of mutual understanding between “decision-making people,” that they have the same interests at heart — and, furthermore, that those interests are necessarily in the best interests of society. That it goes without saying that the police are here to protect students from the strangers roaming their courtyards, and to imply otherwise is not just ridiculous but rude. What are they supposed to be around to protect, anyway? The law?
The Attorney General, of all people, endorses shame culture over, um, law:
As last month’s report from the inspector general acknowledged, the hiring abuses by former Justice Department officials represented a violation of federal Civil Service law, but not of criminal law, he said. “That does not mean, as some people have suggested, that those officials who were found by the joint reports to have committed misconduct have suffered no consequences,” Mr. Mukasey said. “Far from it. The officials most directly implicated in the misconduct left the department to the accompaniment of substantial negative publicity.” (Emphasis mine, of course.)
I’ve been trying to figure out the circumstances under which I would actually believe that the shame provided by “negative publicity” was so strong that it made legal prosecution irrelevant. I can’t come up with any, but I’m willing to leave the possibility open. But this was clearly not that.
For one thing, how “substantial” was this negative publicity anyway? Mukasey implies that it was enough to drum those “most directly implicated” (presumably Gonzales, Goodling, Sampson) out of the Department — though of course they resigned in the midst of other scandals, unrelated to the pervasive sins of hiring practices that have been uncovered in the last year or so. The report itself on such practices received a comparable amount of publicity to, say, John Edwards’ admission of his affair. (And if I were more of a partisan hack I’d point out that this time last decade, the shame of a dalliance exposed wasn’t considered nearly enough to satisfy the demands of justice.)
But the fundamental question if you’re going to equate negative publicity and criminal prosecution is what shame negative publicity can produce, and whether it can be sufficiently punishing to the wrongdoer as an individual. Just having one’s name incanted spitefully or mockingly a few times in the mouths of the Keith Olbermanns in this world is certainly “negative publicity” (to some, at least), but it’s not shame. Shame works because it forces private wrongdoing out into the open, claiming it as public property and revoking the shamebearer’s right to go about his business behind closed doors. Furthermore, it does so in such a way that it transforms public perception; reassimilation is impossible. You, a personality, become identified with your scandal.
This doesn’t seem to have happened here in the least. Goodling and Sampson, in particular, were private citizens with private lives before they were supporting players in a scandal — but instead of the scandal transforming their role in the public eye, they have returned to being private persons again. No cameras parked outside their houses; they were scrutinized only in past tense, in a report that cast them in jobs they’d already left.
True, Goodling doesn’t seem to have been rehired since her resignation — then again, it seems that she had already reached her Peter Principle point. Sampson, on the other hand, had already been rehired by a private firm before the report came out, his resume not so stained as to be illegible. And while rumors persist that Gonzales hasn’t been so lucky in hiring, he’s still making money via public speaking engagements — as good a sign as any that the damage done to his public figure wasn’t as significant as Mukasey makes out. After all, everybody knows that the scandal-tarred don’t go on speaking tours; they go on the vaudeville circuit instead.
I feel a bit of an obligation to call attention to David Brooks’ column from last Friday, not because it’s particularly novel but precisely because it isn’t — at least, not to anyone who read my exchange with Reihan on cultural capital, here and here. In fact, Brooks cited it accordingly (if vaguely), in a passage that reads extremely awkwardly in unlinked print:
[With the release of the iPhone,] media displaced culture. As commenters on The American Scene blog have pointed out, the means of transmission replaced the content of culture as the center of historical excitement and as the marker of social status. Now the global thought-leader is defined less by what culture he enjoys than by the smartphone, social bookmarking site, social network and e-mail provider he uses to store and transmit it. (In this era, MySpace is the new leisure suit and an AOL e-mail address is a scarlet letter of techno-shame.)
Why the iPhone is the single catalyst for so seismic a shift is left unexplained, which is a shame. Brooks’ only major innovation over Reihan and me (other than the advice-column conceit, which is admittedly hilarious) is mapping our vague generalities onto a particular historical timeline — an innovation which would be much more welcome if the points on said timeline were justified rather than apparently arbitrary.
But Brooks’ additions are secondary; it’s the fact that his column exists at all that best proves its point (though I hope this was unintentional). It’s medium, not content, that determines who leads culture — which could be why the fact that these points were originally made by people other than Brooks is far less relevant than the fact that Brooks made them in a far more influential medium. But since the NYT isn’t as hip as a blog, Brooks’ audience doesn’t qualify as members of his “early rejecter” elite. This turns the entire column into a subtle tribute to the fringe bloggers who cultivate ideas for the media mainstream to farm, toiling in our elite obscurity, doomed to being “influential” — which as we know is a euphemism for “small potatoes”.
My apologies for the continued lightness of posting — I’ve been wrapping up a couple of projects this week, and tomorrow will be spent on the road. Should get back up to speed over the weekend; watch this space for thoughts about Sesame Street gender theory and/or Midwestern diners and/or “Mad Men” and/or surveillance-based law enforcement and/or my take on pomObama (which I don’t think is a trope we’ve heard the last of yet).
In the meantime, you should go check out War or Car?, one of the best efforts to make statistics real I’ve seen in a very long time. And by “make statistics real” I mean “DINOSAURS.” Pay it a call.
How to make friends with an anthropologist:
DO NOT: design Pentagon-funded anthro-warrior schemes that make the anthropological establishment leery, then decide that the perfect anthropologist to present the public face of these schemes is the daughter-in-law (and former support staffer!) of a former gun-lobby double agent. (h/t Open Anthropology)
DO: Talk about Transhumanism more often. As ckelty of Savage Minds explains:
Most of the critiques of transhumanism center around its more speculative aspects, like the notion of the singularity, the emergence of artificial intelligence etc. But I think there is increasingly an opening here for thinking about what we do and what we do not have control over as humanity evolves. Most transhumanist rhetoric seems to imply that there is no control—-it’s just the next stage of evolution—-but when push comes to shove, whatever “evolution” means to them, it isn’t simply your basic genetic-species evolution, but involves culture and technology as well.
…
I think that transhumanists will increasingly come to dominate discussions about the controlability of technology and its effects on people and their potential. But more than that, I think anthropologists are already interested in transhumanism, we just don’t call it that because we’ve given up (or just studiously avoid) trying to define the human.
Of course, the closest thing to a Transhumanism expert I know once argued with me for an hour during slow traffic outside Montreal about the worth of my discipline. (The opening line was something like “So, anthropology. Totally useless. Discuss.”) So I’m not too optimistic on the prospects for dialogue here.
Yeah, I know Montgomery McFate got her doctorate from the department that’s giving me my B.A. next June. And I know that my feelings on the Human Terrain System are more complicated than I allow for here. But the spy thing is still pretty hilarious.
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